So, what to do? Among other things, we need to pressure the Democratic Party and the DNC to become more effective. This will mean a change of leadership, a change of strategy, a change of vision. Less cozying up to Wall Street, more genuine grassroots organizing in precincts that really matter!

One good way to pressure the DNC is to ask Elizabeth Warren to do so. For better or for worse, she is now our most effective point person in the Senate – and maybe in the Democratic Party as a whole.

This is a small step, to be sure. But it’s a step we can take so easily.

If you agree, or if you’re just interested in the idea, please check out this petition:

As comment on the unjust verdicts in the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis murder cases lit up the blogosphere this month, I saw scant mention of The Orangeburg Massacre, in which three black students were killed and many more wounded when state police opened fire on a campus demonstration back in 1968. Forty-six years have now passed since then, and that event deserves to be better known and more widely remembered. What follows is adapted from an article I wrote about it for The Boston Globe Magazine, published on February 10, 1985.

On February 8, 1968, more than two years before National Guard troops opened fire on demonstrating students at Kent State University, three college students were killed and 27 were wounded by state police gunfire on a different campus. As at Kent State, the students were unarmed. As at Kent State, they could not believe that they were being fired upon, and many were shot in the side and back as they turned and ran. As at Kent State, “snipers” and “insurgents” were blamed for provoking the incident; as at Kent State, neither snipers nor insurgents were ever found.

But there the similarities between the two tragedies end. The shooting at Kent State sparked widespread outrage and protest, not only on other campuses, but at the highest levels of business and government – and among many American parents who realized that the dead and wounded students could have been their own children.

The earlier shooting, however, went relatively unreported and is to this day virtually unknown. Why? Perhaps because Kent State, set in the heart of the Midwest, was a predominantly white, middle-class school, while the earlier shooting took place in Orangeburg, South Carolina, at South Carolina State College, where more than 95 percent of the students were black.

What exactly happened in Orangeburg on that February night 46 years ago? (continued on next page)

There’s an eerie silence at the center of recent clamorous speculation over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential prospects. No one is asking what she actually stands for. What positions she takes. What she wants to achieve.

This silence is hardly an accident. The news and opinion machinery now in high gear has been designed to keep substantive matters off the table. As long as people are obsessed with the “will she/won’t she” question, they can be distracted from wondering what Hillary actually would do if she were president.

The fantasies of voters are best projected onto a blank screen. Hillary’s handlers are going to keep her as blank as possible for as long as possible.

What progressive media must do, then, is ignore the purely speculative question of Hillary ‘s presidential future and focus instead on the substantive question of Hillary’s concrete political commitments. Above all, they should hammer on whether Hillary will work hard to reduce wealth and income inequality – nationally and globally.

Like it or not, Hillary is now the weathervane atop the Democratic Party. If she can be pointed toward more populist economics, most of the Party and its apparatus will follow her. See David Freedlander’s very interesting piece in The Daily Beaston the fight over economic populism now being waged within the Party.

Now is the time. Hillary is much more vulnerable to pressure from progressives now — while Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are still imaginable alternatives.

I am starting to think that US democracy has a dignity deficit. We talk endlesslyabout freedom, we talk a lot about equality, but we almost never talk about dignity. Why not?

The answer has a lot to do with the way we imagine the meaning of “equality.” But before I explain why, I want to spend a moment establishing the premise – that democracy has a great deal to do with dignity whether we talk about it or not.

If we imagine a democracy functioning effectively, don’t we assume that its citizens will have dignity? Conversely, if we try to imagine a democracy in which most citizens lack a sense of dignity, don’t we immediately feel a self-contradiction? Why should all persons be free and equal if they are not all worth something? Why would each of us care about our own personal freedom and equality if we did not feel that we – each of us – had value? Conversely, if we took a deeply cynical view of humans and human nature, wouldn’t we be indifferent to the matter of how people are governed?

So, if democracy is bound up with the idea of dignity (as I think it is) why do we hardly ever talk about it?

Why Not Dignity?

The answer is that we take dignity for granted. And the main reason we do so is that we suppose it comes along automatically with freedom and equality – but especially, I would argue, with equality. For we can imagine a free people refusing to concede each other’s dignity. But it’s much harder to imagine a people who have agreed to see themselves as equal not agreeing also to consider themselves being equal in dignity.

Equality seems to entail dignity. But for that very reason we are tempted to assume that equality guarantees dignity. And that’s a mistake.

Many marriage vows are imbued with the belief that marriage has a lot to do with love. But we know (after a while) that those vows don’t guarantee love. Likewise (a subtler analogy here), most of us imagine that “justice” also means “fairness.” But in actual practice, justice is not always fair. And as legal philosophers know, some systems of justice are much more explicitly and deliberately concerned with fairness than others.

So if you want your marriage to nurture and be nurtured by love, you have to work to make it do so. If you want a just system of justice to produce fairness, you have to work to make it do so.

And if we – “we the people” — really want democratic equality to produce democratic dignity, we have to do something. But what?

The answer will have everything to do with what we take “equality” and “dignity” to mean. And that’s a long conversation. But for the moment it’s fair to say that we should simply talk more about dignity when we talk about democracy. Look at the contemporary political scene: isn’t one of our main problems that we frame policy issues exclusively in terms of freedom and equality? What if the debates over health care were explicitly about citizens’ and patients’ dignity? What if the debates over Voter ID laws were not just about equality and freedom, but about the ways such laws jeopardize citizens’ dignity? What if the debates over wealth inequality hinged not just on the tension between equality and freedom but on an agreed commitment to value each others’ dignity?

Personally, I think this is a word progressives in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, need to grab hold of and “own” – now.

Meanwhile, we should at least spend some time thinking about dignity and its relation to equality in democracy. I’ll take these matter up in later blog postings, and any thoughts and comments you might have would be most welcome. (See “Leave a Comment” below.)

Like this:

As we wait for the verdict in the Zimmerman case to be announced, I find myself hefting the weight of that word “wait” once again. It has such a long and heavy history in the lives and thoughts of black Americans. It keeps coming back like a bad spirit or a zombie. Wait. Wait. Wait. Will it ever go away?

The most famous words about waiting are Dr. King’s. Familiar as they are, they’re worth remembering today:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; … when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has been advertised on television, and see tears welling in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing unconscious bitterness toward white people; ….when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued by inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” – then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Reading these words again today, waiting for a verdict that is sure to disappoint, can anyone not see the ghost of Trayvon Martin walking through them? Trayvon as a six-year-old boy being schooled about white folks by his parents? Trayvon as a teenager feeling clouds of bitter understanding – W.T.F?!? — forming in his mind? Trayvon in his last moments on the night of February 26, 2012, living as always at tiptoe and never knowing quite what to expect next: like, who is this creepy-ass cracker following me?

Once again we see the old claim of acting in self-defense put forward with the bland “innocence” that so enraged James Baldwin – whites’ denial of the fact that white racism has created the spectral, hooded blackness against which Zimmerman felt he had to “defend” himself.

Until the word “intent” recognizes that white racism shapes whites’ actions and attitudes in ways they are not conscious of – but are nonetheless accountable for – black Americans will go on waiting for justice. Until the word “malice” is understood to include racist fear among its meanings, many black Americans will go through life at tiptoe, fearful because they are feared. Until racism itself can be put on trial, we will all go on waiting — waiting for the verdict that finally puts an end to our waiting.

The Book

"In this work of enormous breadth, depth, and imagination, Nick Bromell makes what may be the most original contribution to political theory in the past decade. How important that in this age of alleged color blindness, Bromell has the vision and the chutzpah to turn to African American thought—ideas born of struggle, anchored in questions of dignity, human relationships, and faith—in order to revitalize American democracy. And as its title proclaims, the work is a matter of great urgency."

—Robin D.G. Kelley
Gary B. Nash Professor of U.S. History, University of California at Los Angeles, and author ofFreedom Dreams

Advance Notices

“In this fine book, Nick Bromell’s aim is to think through the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political registers of racial inequality, prejudice, and domination and to unleash the powers of imagination and vision on behalf of a new, more just social order and a transformed public philosophy. In the process, he enacts the 'now' on behalf of which he writes, with empathic and imaginative readings of major texts of political theory and literature, oriented by the worlds of African American letters and critical race theory. Synthetic and innovative, political, historical and literary, The Time is Always Now will interest anyone who cares about US racial politics, 19th- and 20th-century American literature, democratic theory and black political thought.”

—Bonnie Honig
Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media, and Political Science, Brown University, and author of Antigone, Interrupted

About Nick Bromell

Nick Bromell brings political theory and historical scholarship to bear on current issues and debates, especially those that swirl around race in the United States.

He is the author of three books and is working on a fourth, which deals with the political thought of Frederick Douglass. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, American Literature, American Music, The Boston Review, Harper's, Raritan, Political Theory, The Boston Globe, The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, Fortune, The New York Times, New England Monthly, and on-line at Alternet, Exquisite Corpse, and Salon.